Dead thumb drive revival?

Can't believe it finally happened. Went to grab some goodies off of one of my USB thumb drives and all it would do is flash once and nothing. Won't even register as a drive. Tried it over and over but nothing. Completely flat-lined. ugh

Dead. Or is there some magic wand that will fix it?
 
I've had good results several times in the past with the Easeus data recovery tool when camera SD cards and TV recording thumbsticks have played up on me.

https://www.easeus.com/data-recovery-software/

The usual reasons I've discovered are either low battery power in the camera or momentary power interruption to a PC or TV-recorder while the card is in place, I've always managed to get the files back.
 
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Tried all USB ports? or you have another PC or laptop try it in that first, may be an issue with your USB ports. May sound daft but tried waggling it around in the socket?

Suggest running USBDEview from Nirsoft https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html that if that can see the thumbdrive then it may be fixable if not, it's more than likely deceased.
 
I just had one of my External Drives show and error on me and I can't access any files on it. I've heard of these data recovery businesses on the web but they cost a bundle. Too bad because a lot of my Trainz original files were on there.
 
Tried everything, but looks like it's toast.

It was quite old. Can't even remember when and where it came from. Almost all of the trainz stuff on it was transferred to another newer drive about a year ago, so in that way it wasn't a total loss. It contained all kinds of other things I had meant to transfer knowing it probably wouldn't last long. A lot of it will take going to look for something and realizing it was probably on that drive. Procrastination got the better of me this time. Live and learn.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.
 
One last thing worth trying. Instead of plugging it into the computer ports plug it into a external-powered USB2.0 hub attached to the PC , in case it's drawing so much current the PC is shutting it down. The hub might just allow it to grab enough current to initialise.
 
I also have the EaseUS tools and they work well too, and I too have used the Nir-soft utility. (Malc and I think alike a lot of time it seems).

I have had some bad USB ports, which wreaked havoc with a lot of peripherals. My old Intel motherboard took a hit through a USB port due to a bad external drive. The hit destroyed the Northbridge chip, which controls all USB ports, SATA, and memory causing the mother board to lose half the memory installed, and everything else to die.

USB thumb drives, by their very nature, only handle just so many writes. Unlike a hard disk, these are only EEROMs except they are faster, which work by writing data at a higher voltage and reading back at a lower. Eventually the bits inside will die and is more of an issue if the same spot has been written to more than others due to the size of the files.
 
I tend to use Linux to recover Windows media but by chance do you have access to a Chrome or Android device, a smart TV/home cinema system or car with a USB media connection. You are unlikely to be able to read Trainz files but may give you a more informed idea if the drive has died or just play hard to read under Windows. Peter
 
I tend to use Linux to recover Windows media but by chance do you have access to a Chrome or Android device, a smart TV/home cinema system or car with a USB media connection. You are unlikely to be able to read Trainz files but may give you a more informed idea if the drive has died or just play hard to read under Windows. Peter

Many of the drive repair utilities run a 'nix based shell or boot into a flavor of Linux to do their repair work. This works fine for file structure that can't be read, but if the device has died physically, then this won't work either. Reading the data doesn't matter, but accessing the folder structure is important. If an asset is in a folder and there's a readme, the readme file can be opened and checked, verifying that the drive is okay and only the MFT is corrupt and there are ways to repair that using the provided utilities.

There are also other programs that read the disk at a bit level rather than the file structure level. I have used such a utility to recover erased folders and they work quite well. One such utility is ISO Buster, which works quite nicely and another whose name escapes me also works for hard disks.

Part of the problem we run into with USB thumb drives and SSDs is there is no magnetic surface and the data is saved to memory structures instead. Eventually these bits wear through and even with the algorithms to move data blocks when things get sketchy, this isn't always successful with these devices due to chaining of bad data blocks. Some data blocks will affect those next to them and eventually a big hunk of the device fails.

As Dave Snow mentioned, hard disk recovery is expensive! I had a company look at doing this for someone and at the time, over 20 years ago now, it cost $600 just to look at the disk. As it turned out the disk was fried and nothing could be recovered. More recently, well about 8 years ago, I had to get a drive repaired for a manager I worked with. The data was quite critical, and I had to get sign-offs up the ying-yang to get permission to have the drive looked at. The cost for this recovery was well over $1500 and it was quite successful. While these drive recovery processes are out of the budget of most Trainzers, I would still look at various utilities such as those mentioned here.
 
I have managed to get a reluctant hard drive working long enough to extract files from it before it crashed again by putting it in a plastic baggie and letting it sit in a freezer overnight. The cold-soaked ships seem to work. I've recovered 4 out of 7 drives that way. I don't know if it would work with a thumb drive, though. EEPROMs are a different beast.

Bill
 
I have managed to get a reluctant hard drive working long enough to extract files from it before it crashed again by putting it in a plastic baggie and letting it sit in a freezer overnight. The cold-soaked ships seem to work. I've recovered 4 out of 7 drives that way. I don't know if it would work with a thumb drive, though. EEPROMs are a different beast.

Bill

I've done that too. It's the same as hitting the drive with freeze spray probably, but better for the environment. I don't think this will work with the thumb drives though, although it might be worth the try. The issue I see is moisture build up on the connector, which will then be wet when plugged into the USB port and that isn't such a good idea.
 
What I do before the freezer is put it in a plastic baggie and suck the air out with a straw as I close it. If in doubt, hit it with a shot of compressed air to make sure the connector is dry. I don't see this working with a thumb drive now that I think about it. No moving parts to shrink/expand (unless it's a cold-solder joint somewhere).

Bill
 
I've actually done recovery a few times, mostly for other people.

Drive in freezer or fridge overnight, both have worked.
If it's a chip issue it will probably be painfully hot to touch, find a suitable heatsink and clamp it with an insulated clamp of some kind to the drive / pcb on top of the defective chip, insulating tape works as a clamp, works for a bit longer than just freezing ;o)
Borrow the PCB from an identical drive if you have one.

Linux will often read a "dead" drive in that it's not dependant on the bios to find it so worth a try.
 
I've actually done recovery a few times, mostly for other people.

Drive in freezer or fridge overnight, both have worked.
If it's a chip issue it will probably be painfully hot to touch, find a suitable heatsink and clamp it with an insulated clamp of some kind to the drive / pcb on top of the defective chip, insulating tape works as a clamp, works for a bit longer than just freezing ;o)
Borrow the PCB from an identical drive if you have one.

Linux will often read a "dead" drive in that it's not dependant on the bios to find it so worth a try.

I've done a PCB transplant, but that worked only once due to BIOS differences between the boards on other drives even though they were identical otherwise. The heatsink trick does work as well. I forgot about that one. I used that sticky tape to old the heat sink on the drive. When the data was retrieved, I yanked the heat sink off and disassembled the drive for bearings and magnets anyway so I didn't care if the board ripped where the sticky tape was attached to the chip.

I will say though I'm very familiar with hot chips! Way back in my tech days, I used to fix RAM cards that had huge, not kidding size wise, RAM chips. 90% of the failures were caused by cooking RAM chips that were found unexpectedly while brushing against them while checking other things on the circuit boards. Oh these chips were nominal at 8k by 1 bit and about the length of a matchbox car.

Linux does work for drives that haven't had their own Bios fry, but once that goes, well the drive is toast.
 
@ Dave, as a thought may be worth removing that external from it's casing and connecting direct to a motherboard SATA port, often its the enclosures circuitry that's died rather than the actual drive, I did that not so long ago with a 4TB drive in a defective Seagate NAS, stuck it in a USB3 enclosure and it's fine.
 
Threw it into the freezer overnight and it actually showed up, only as a cd rom. Soon as I tried to right click on it...poof. Nothing.

Guess I'll keep it, toss it outside this winter when it's below zero and see if it finally remembers what it really is. :D
 
Threw it into the freezer overnight and it actually showed up, only as a cd rom. Soon as I tried to right click on it...poof. Nothing.

Guess I'll keep it, toss it outside this winter when it's below zero and see if it finally remembers what it really is. :D

Well, that's progress of a sort. :hehe: Maybe it would stay around longer if you strapped a couple of freeze packs around it when you took it out of the freezer. I can see it now, stuffed in a cooler with ice packs around it and a USB cord dongle plugged into it as you frantically extract data before it dies again. That appeals to my author side. A book called "The Zombie Drive."

Bill
 
Dead Thumb Drive Revival

To be sure, if the drive is not even recognized by your computer, then recovery software is probably not going to work. Software such as that depends on being able to read the device to look for the recoverable files. It the drive cannot be "seen" by the computer, then the software can't scan the drive.
That being said, you could try seeing if the drive is readable by another computer. If so, then run a recovery software on it from that computer. SanDisk RescuePRO is a good one to use.
If, though, the drive cannot be read by another computer, then consider sending it off for professional recovery. Sounds like "surgery" may need to be done on it to get the memory chips off it, and extract your data.
 
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